Saturday
Dec132008
Douglas Rushkoff and Open Source Judaism
Saturday, December 13, 2008 at 11:48PM
B'nai Brith Magazine
August 2004
Ten years ago, a suburban mom was looking for something her 14-year-old, who was hooked on the Internet, could read. She found something called Cyberia by Douglas Rushkoff. It looked cool. It explained what the net was for, how it worked, and explained how its "purity" or idealism was being corrupted by big business. The kid flipped, emailed the author began a conversation that continues.
The kid is now a Jewish Internet pro, and Rushkoff is working on something called Open Source Judaism. The project is an outgrowth of Rushkoff’s adult connection with Judaism, and it makes relevant points that many in Jewish leadership--religious and secular--have been missing. The strongest point, one that is the title of his latest book and at the root of a surging controversy, is that Nothing is Sacred -- especially in Judaism. In that he echoes Maimonides and other great Jewish scholars. Yet The Jerusalem Report, among others, labeled him an athiest, because they said, he's an iconoclast. It is as if they forgot the second commandment: the one about icons and not having any: Thou shalt not have any graven images before you.
Nothing is Sacred is about that second commandment and how it can be interpreted on several levels, beginning with good ol' fashioned Gilgamesh/Ba'al-child-sacrificing idolatry, and rising to other levels, including the iconization of people, ideas and Jewish institutions. Needless to say, people in all sectors of the Jewish establishment got angry and labeled Rushkoff an "outsider" guilty of deconstructing their universe. He explained in a number of interviews, and in articles in the New York Press, the Forward and the New York Times, that Jewish institutions were more interested in headcounts and dues than they were in spiritual matters. The controversy cracked wide-open when Rushkoff publicly mentioned the Republican pollsters hired to find out where the Jews were. An author of several books dissecting the media and as a professor of media, Rushkoff had been welcomed by the "elite" establishment in New York looking to revivify the Jewish community. Their goal was to attract “latent Jews” being annihilated in a holocaust of assimilation. When the intelligent 42-year old started asking intelligent questions, the ground opened beneath his feet and they willed him to disappear.
It wasn't as if Rushkoff had begun a "journey" to Judaism. He’d analyzed the meaning of Jewish continuity, as requested. The first page of Nothing is Sacred quotes Joan Rivers. "Can we talk?"
And the Jewish establishment said "Absolutely Not!"
Rushkoff says he’s too busy too talk, what with a new house in Brooklyn and trying to jump start his family, but hey, that's what the net is for. So you have to ask him how he arrived at this space in time.
He responds in a heartbeat: “What makes you think I got here in time? (insert Groucho eyebrow raise, here) Honestly, I do fear we got here too late to save this thing called Judaism. I was thinking about continuity. Not continuity in the ‘how many people belong to synagogue’ way, but continuity of the great inquiry that characterizes the Jewish project since Abraham. Can we continue the conversation for another generation? Or have we calcified this thing we call Judaism into a permanent religion – a religion to believe in?
”The Internet interested me in keeping conversation and autonomy alive. I saw in Judaism an entire philosophy – even a civilization – dedicated to conversation and autonomy. So that’s where I turned for support. I found the argument of ‘continuity’ used as justification to enact one of the greatest discontinuities in Jewish history: turning a system of life into a religion for blind believers and shutting down the conversation. Fundamentalists are running the asylum, and they don’t even know they are fundamentalists. They think that’s Judaism. And thus, we’re here.”
Dark-haired and olive-skinned as he is, Rushkoff was the establishment’s fair-haired boy for a while. They were infatuated with his ideas, but forgot that his role in life and claim to fame was that of marketing and media dissection. They first noticed him in 1999 when he’d written a few columns for National Public Radio called, “Remember the Sabbath,” which examined secular reasons to observe Shabbat. Some outreach organizations reached out to him, and then the philanthropists did.
“I was in their good graces for two reasons,” he says. “I gave them street cred – legitimacy – on some efforts that had the taint of marketing. And I stood a chance of bringing my reading audience – people that outreach groups think of as ‘cool people’ - along with me into Judaism.
”They were infatuated with the idea of Open Source Judaism – treating Jewish texts as source materials for anyone to interpret, or reinterpret. I told them Judaism is like a computer that needs a ‘cold reboot.’ That doesn’t mean erasing anything, just restarting it to see what’s in the original system, and I developed a web site where people could create and exchange Haggadah texts and interpretations (opensourcehaggadah.com) that tied in with many institutions’ desire to ‘kick start’ Judaism. The institutions didn’t realize that some ‘real’ Judaism might start to happen.”
At a Passover seder in suburban New Jersey, Rushkoff explains to a family grounded in ultra-Orthodoxy that each of the ten plagues repudiates an Egyptian god, and it is the ram, the highest Egyptian god, the creator, whose blood saves the life of the Jewish firstborns who are supposed to be sacrificed. No one in yeshiva taught them that, and he reiterated something not even the most ultra-Orthodox scholar will deny--that Judaism is the exact opposite of paganism and death cults. Israel was surrounded by religions of death, where people are rewarded after they die. Judaism is a religion to life. L’chaim, in those days, was a naughty, revolutionary statement!”
So how did he infuriate everyone when he suggested that for certain Jews, Zionism or rabbi ‘worship’ are a form of idolatry?
“I have no problem with the notion of rabbis, Israel, or even big expensive temple buildings here in the US. I am concerned when people relate to authorities and institutions as if what they say are ‘sacred” truths. When we use Torah as a land title or deed by saying ‘God gave us Israel because it says so in Genesis right here,’ we get into trouble. For then Torah needs to mean a particular literal thing, and the conversation dies. When the conversation dies, the Torah dies because it becomes immutable, and then its meaning cannot change—as it was meant to do.
”Jews—everyone--must learn to live without absolute, inviolable truths. When I say this, people accuse me of saying that Israel should be destroyed, or that rabbis should have been killed in the Holocaust. That is outrageous. Of course I am not saying that!!
“Frankly, most Jews I’ve met are institutionally affiliated because they want pat answers; they don’t want to deal with questions. They want to be told the way things are. No one seems to want Judaism’s true path--a path of uncertainty. They want boundaries. They want daddies.”
Rushkoff was approached to attract teens and 20-somethings back into Judaism. He wondered why leadership felt Jewish continuity was in crisis, and offered “some remedies.”
Ironically he notes, “These were not remedies they wanted. I was arguing to define Judaism beyond race or place and they were figuring out how to get Jews to marry Jews, or make TV commercials to turn American-Jewish teenagers into Zionists. They reacted like fundamentalist protectors of a sacred belief system. They didn’t realize my inquiry, and the inquiry inspired through my books and talks, is Jewish. Continuity is harder than I thought – and true Jewish continuity may have to be done far beyond what is currently thought of as Judaism. I may even drop the word “Jewish” altogether, in order to continue its spirit forward.”
The path Rushkoff takes, of course, is on the Internet, with his website. Opensourcejudaism.com is a labor of love, costing lots of time, energy and server space. There’s a terrific need for the conversation, but now, no one in Jewish world will pay for a conversation that has no clear boundaries. There’s no way to set an agenda, and no way to know how and where it’s going to go. So does he think the Internet still the gateway to a Jewish future?
“Yes, but it’s not the solution, because there is no real community. Many of the more conversational Jewish websites are run by college-age students, many of them extremists, like any other extremists that age--I was an extremist punk in college--so it’s very hard to know who’s on the other side of the screen. We don’t want to create false messiahs.”
Rushkoff notes that in the old days, meaningful discussion about Torah, and halakhah could only take place between as many people as could fit around a table. This required Judaism’s laws and legends to be negotiated by a select few. Now the online environment allows the Talmudic process to occur between larger groups of people.
“Open Source Judaism is an invitation to anyone who wants to get involved with Judaism. Online, we can have discussions between hundreds or thousands of people. We can share information and translations, we can access Midrash and Talmud, and we can coalesce our points of view. The Internet and computer code provide a great allegory for ‘process Judaism.’ They help us understand that Judaism is a system developed by people (even if divinely inspired) and that we should try to determine what it was really built for so that we can then figure out how update the operating system for modern times and Diaspora.”
An e-mail arrives from a fellow who happened to pick up Nothing is Sacred at Barnes and Nobel. As a result, he started his own minyan. Rushkoff says he gets one or two emails like it a day, and feels that if people are founding minyanim, he can’t be that bad.
Says Rushkoff, “I think of reality as being up for grabs; we’ve created all sorts of institutions and systems of thought to keep ourselves from remembering just how much in charge we really are. I want to work toward a world where people are less afraid to accept the fact that we are the adults here. And that it can even be fun to accept this responsibility.”
August 2004
Ten years ago, a suburban mom was looking for something her 14-year-old, who was hooked on the Internet, could read. She found something called Cyberia by Douglas Rushkoff. It looked cool. It explained what the net was for, how it worked, and explained how its "purity" or idealism was being corrupted by big business. The kid flipped, emailed the author began a conversation that continues.
The kid is now a Jewish Internet pro, and Rushkoff is working on something called Open Source Judaism. The project is an outgrowth of Rushkoff’s adult connection with Judaism, and it makes relevant points that many in Jewish leadership--religious and secular--have been missing. The strongest point, one that is the title of his latest book and at the root of a surging controversy, is that Nothing is Sacred -- especially in Judaism. In that he echoes Maimonides and other great Jewish scholars. Yet The Jerusalem Report, among others, labeled him an athiest, because they said, he's an iconoclast. It is as if they forgot the second commandment: the one about icons and not having any: Thou shalt not have any graven images before you.
Nothing is Sacred is about that second commandment and how it can be interpreted on several levels, beginning with good ol' fashioned Gilgamesh/Ba'al-child-sacrificing idolatry, and rising to other levels, including the iconization of people, ideas and Jewish institutions. Needless to say, people in all sectors of the Jewish establishment got angry and labeled Rushkoff an "outsider" guilty of deconstructing their universe. He explained in a number of interviews, and in articles in the New York Press, the Forward and the New York Times, that Jewish institutions were more interested in headcounts and dues than they were in spiritual matters. The controversy cracked wide-open when Rushkoff publicly mentioned the Republican pollsters hired to find out where the Jews were. An author of several books dissecting the media and as a professor of media, Rushkoff had been welcomed by the "elite" establishment in New York looking to revivify the Jewish community. Their goal was to attract “latent Jews” being annihilated in a holocaust of assimilation. When the intelligent 42-year old started asking intelligent questions, the ground opened beneath his feet and they willed him to disappear.
It wasn't as if Rushkoff had begun a "journey" to Judaism. He’d analyzed the meaning of Jewish continuity, as requested. The first page of Nothing is Sacred quotes Joan Rivers. "Can we talk?"
And the Jewish establishment said "Absolutely Not!"
Rushkoff says he’s too busy too talk, what with a new house in Brooklyn and trying to jump start his family, but hey, that's what the net is for. So you have to ask him how he arrived at this space in time.
He responds in a heartbeat: “What makes you think I got here in time? (insert Groucho eyebrow raise, here) Honestly, I do fear we got here too late to save this thing called Judaism. I was thinking about continuity. Not continuity in the ‘how many people belong to synagogue’ way, but continuity of the great inquiry that characterizes the Jewish project since Abraham. Can we continue the conversation for another generation? Or have we calcified this thing we call Judaism into a permanent religion – a religion to believe in?
”The Internet interested me in keeping conversation and autonomy alive. I saw in Judaism an entire philosophy – even a civilization – dedicated to conversation and autonomy. So that’s where I turned for support. I found the argument of ‘continuity’ used as justification to enact one of the greatest discontinuities in Jewish history: turning a system of life into a religion for blind believers and shutting down the conversation. Fundamentalists are running the asylum, and they don’t even know they are fundamentalists. They think that’s Judaism. And thus, we’re here.”
Dark-haired and olive-skinned as he is, Rushkoff was the establishment’s fair-haired boy for a while. They were infatuated with his ideas, but forgot that his role in life and claim to fame was that of marketing and media dissection. They first noticed him in 1999 when he’d written a few columns for National Public Radio called, “Remember the Sabbath,” which examined secular reasons to observe Shabbat. Some outreach organizations reached out to him, and then the philanthropists did.
“I was in their good graces for two reasons,” he says. “I gave them street cred – legitimacy – on some efforts that had the taint of marketing. And I stood a chance of bringing my reading audience – people that outreach groups think of as ‘cool people’ - along with me into Judaism.
”They were infatuated with the idea of Open Source Judaism – treating Jewish texts as source materials for anyone to interpret, or reinterpret. I told them Judaism is like a computer that needs a ‘cold reboot.’ That doesn’t mean erasing anything, just restarting it to see what’s in the original system, and I developed a web site where people could create and exchange Haggadah texts and interpretations (opensourcehaggadah.com) that tied in with many institutions’ desire to ‘kick start’ Judaism. The institutions didn’t realize that some ‘real’ Judaism might start to happen.”
At a Passover seder in suburban New Jersey, Rushkoff explains to a family grounded in ultra-Orthodoxy that each of the ten plagues repudiates an Egyptian god, and it is the ram, the highest Egyptian god, the creator, whose blood saves the life of the Jewish firstborns who are supposed to be sacrificed. No one in yeshiva taught them that, and he reiterated something not even the most ultra-Orthodox scholar will deny--that Judaism is the exact opposite of paganism and death cults. Israel was surrounded by religions of death, where people are rewarded after they die. Judaism is a religion to life. L’chaim, in those days, was a naughty, revolutionary statement!”
So how did he infuriate everyone when he suggested that for certain Jews, Zionism or rabbi ‘worship’ are a form of idolatry?
“I have no problem with the notion of rabbis, Israel, or even big expensive temple buildings here in the US. I am concerned when people relate to authorities and institutions as if what they say are ‘sacred” truths. When we use Torah as a land title or deed by saying ‘God gave us Israel because it says so in Genesis right here,’ we get into trouble. For then Torah needs to mean a particular literal thing, and the conversation dies. When the conversation dies, the Torah dies because it becomes immutable, and then its meaning cannot change—as it was meant to do.
”Jews—everyone--must learn to live without absolute, inviolable truths. When I say this, people accuse me of saying that Israel should be destroyed, or that rabbis should have been killed in the Holocaust. That is outrageous. Of course I am not saying that!!
“Frankly, most Jews I’ve met are institutionally affiliated because they want pat answers; they don’t want to deal with questions. They want to be told the way things are. No one seems to want Judaism’s true path--a path of uncertainty. They want boundaries. They want daddies.”
Rushkoff was approached to attract teens and 20-somethings back into Judaism. He wondered why leadership felt Jewish continuity was in crisis, and offered “some remedies.”
Ironically he notes, “These were not remedies they wanted. I was arguing to define Judaism beyond race or place and they were figuring out how to get Jews to marry Jews, or make TV commercials to turn American-Jewish teenagers into Zionists. They reacted like fundamentalist protectors of a sacred belief system. They didn’t realize my inquiry, and the inquiry inspired through my books and talks, is Jewish. Continuity is harder than I thought – and true Jewish continuity may have to be done far beyond what is currently thought of as Judaism. I may even drop the word “Jewish” altogether, in order to continue its spirit forward.”
The path Rushkoff takes, of course, is on the Internet, with his website. Opensourcejudaism.com is a labor of love, costing lots of time, energy and server space. There’s a terrific need for the conversation, but now, no one in Jewish world will pay for a conversation that has no clear boundaries. There’s no way to set an agenda, and no way to know how and where it’s going to go. So does he think the Internet still the gateway to a Jewish future?
“Yes, but it’s not the solution, because there is no real community. Many of the more conversational Jewish websites are run by college-age students, many of them extremists, like any other extremists that age--I was an extremist punk in college--so it’s very hard to know who’s on the other side of the screen. We don’t want to create false messiahs.”
Rushkoff notes that in the old days, meaningful discussion about Torah, and halakhah could only take place between as many people as could fit around a table. This required Judaism’s laws and legends to be negotiated by a select few. Now the online environment allows the Talmudic process to occur between larger groups of people.
“Open Source Judaism is an invitation to anyone who wants to get involved with Judaism. Online, we can have discussions between hundreds or thousands of people. We can share information and translations, we can access Midrash and Talmud, and we can coalesce our points of view. The Internet and computer code provide a great allegory for ‘process Judaism.’ They help us understand that Judaism is a system developed by people (even if divinely inspired) and that we should try to determine what it was really built for so that we can then figure out how update the operating system for modern times and Diaspora.”
An e-mail arrives from a fellow who happened to pick up Nothing is Sacred at Barnes and Nobel. As a result, he started his own minyan. Rushkoff says he gets one or two emails like it a day, and feels that if people are founding minyanim, he can’t be that bad.
Says Rushkoff, “I think of reality as being up for grabs; we’ve created all sorts of institutions and systems of thought to keep ourselves from remembering just how much in charge we really are. I want to work toward a world where people are less afraid to accept the fact that we are the adults here. And that it can even be fun to accept this responsibility.”
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